How to Avoid Burnout and Keep Pursuing your Passion!

Hey everyone, I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday.

I spent the morning chewing over some aphorisms from Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes while having some Bulletproof coffee. If you’re looking for some stimulating and sometimes controversial ideas to think about about, definitely check out Taleb’s book.

I also read my daily post from Maria Popova’s blog, brainpickings.org. I cannot recommend it highly enough. She’s an amazing writer and has an uncanny ability to take history’s greatest ideas and convey them in cogent, concise language.

Now, onto the actual content:

If you’ve ever felt drained, burnt out, or sick of something that you used to love, this one’s for you.

I’ve found that the pursuit of passion often cycles through different seasons.

It starts with an idea. Maybe you get this great idea for a product, or hear of a dietary regimen that speaks to you. You feel excited. You’re inspired. You get this burst of energy that sets you on the path towards making your idea a reality.

In the beginning, everything seems to be going well. Things are hard and the hours are long, but you expected as much. You have both the passion and drive to keep things going – it’s a labor of love.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, motivation begins to falter. Maybe things aren’t going as well as you thought they would, or the hours of work are getting too long for the rewards you’re getting. Hell, a lot of the time, life just rears its ugly head and kicks you in the ass, and you have to take care of other important things like family, relationships, the bills, etc.

By the time you get back, you’ve lost momentum. It’s harder to get back into the groove and the fire you once had for the work is all but gone. When we find ourselves in this situation, a lot of us end up calling it quits, saying stuff like “shit happens” and “it was a phase.”

Take this blog for example. When I first started it some 15 months ago, I felt the same inspired spark. I managed to churn out a couple posts in the beginning. It was hard. There were problems – I wasn’t disciplined and I didn’t know how to make the most of my time, but it was fun and I loved doing it.

But then I started work teaching 7th graders at a summer school, I started training for a BJJ tournament. I missed a couple weeks of writing and by then, I had lost what little momentum that I had.

I was stuck in the exact spot that I described earlier.

There are tons of areas in our lives that fall victim to these “slumps.”

We start a new diet and stay super disciplined and strict with our meals for the first couple weeks but then something comes up – a birthday party, a dinner out with friends, and we cave. We gorge ourselves on chocolate cake and then call it quits.

Or when we start a workout plan. The first couple weeks are hard and we’re sore all over but it feels good, and one day we find ourselves rationalizing why it’s ok to skip out “just this once.”

As students, we tend to feel inspired and driven as we enter the semester only to burn out after a couple weeks (or days) of hard work.

Why does this happen to us? Why do we work our asses off only to lose motivation later on? Why do we get burnt out?

There’s a lot of literature out there that attempts to answer these questions way better than I could. I recommend checking out, The Power of Habit, or Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength for a more in-depth look at how these processes work.

But we don’t need a comprehensive analysis to tell us how we feel before we end up quitting.

Passion is a feeling that, by its nature, must be directed towards something. When aimed at a particular object or goal, passion has the power to produce amazing amounts of energy and motivation.

But passion, like energy and willpower, is a finite resource. Each of us only has so passion to spend before we exhaust our supply. Just as a car can’t move anywhere without fuel, if we’ve used up all of our passion, it’s unlikely that we will want to muster the energy to continue pursuing whatever it was we were passionate about.

Think of passion and the energy that it produces as seeds to be sown. It is true that you reap what you sow, and if you sow no seeds, there will be no harvest for you to reap. But if you sow all of your seeds at once and a storm wipes out our entire crop, you will have neither a bountiful harvest nor any seeds left to sow.

Life is pay to play. Whether it’s energy, money, or time, whatever it is, you have to put something in to get anything out. But it’s important that we balance the resources that we spend.

Always keep something in the tank. Don’t burn up all of your fuel at once.

If you’re starting a new training regimen, don’t go in on the first day and completely waste yourself on all of the exercises.

If you’re starting a new diet plan, don’t use up all of your motivation and willpower by depriving yourself of the foods you love all at once.

Do it progressively. It’s much better to write 250 words every weekday over a month than to write 4000 in one day and then not write for 29 days straight.

Steady progress every day builds momentum, which makes it progressively easier to keep going. Becoming our best selves takes time and consistent effort. Bruce Wayne trained all over the world for 15 years before he became Batman. We’re in this for the long haul.

Til’ next time.

– Becoming Batman

Summertime Slump

Dang. It’s that time of year again. Every year, around Memorial Day Weekend, it seems that I sink into a kind of slump that kills the positive momentum I’ve been building up from the end of the school semester. Just when I feel ready to dive into a summer of productivity and progress, three to four days of eating junk and lying around in a sedentary state makes me feel.. slumpy.

It’s difficult to figure out what hits me first. My momentum dies and my brain begins to feel fuzzy. My muscles stiffen up and I get bloated. I have difficulty getting to sleep so my circadian rhythm gets thrown off and when I eventually do end up sleeping, it’s almost impossible to wake up. It seems like I need more sleep while I’m in one of these slumpy periods. What sucks is that despite the added bedtime hours, I still feel fatigued all day.

(Me after a weekend of eating junk)

Becoming Batman

Hey guys!

Welcome to my blog! I’ve been kicking around the idea to start a blog for a while  and just recently took the plunge. I just wanna say, I’m so excited to be writing my very first post. To start, I guess I’ll answer the most obvious question:

Becoming Batman?

Ok. I know it’s cheesy but bear with me for a minute. Aside from me being a total comic book nerd, the name of my blog is a reflection of what I want it to be about: self improvement.

Self improvement is something I’ve been passionate about for my whole life. The idea that you can engage in specific behaviors that will help you to become a stronger, smarter, kinder, wiser, more efficient, all-around better version of yourself was fascinating to me. Since then, I’ve read everything I could get my hands on relating to this topic. From books on diet, to mindfulness, to exercise, to philosophy, everything. I was hooked on self improvement.

Here’s where it connects. You know how Batman wasn’t born ready to get out there and fight the most dangerous criminals of Gotham from the get go? Yeah, it’s something like that. Before there was Batman, there was Bruce Wayne. He was a scared, weak, helpless little boy (or young man, depending on who you ask).

 

He had to go through years of hardship and grueling training before he became the genius detective badass we know as Batman.

 

“The will is everything. If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely. Are you ready to begin?” – Ra’s Al Ghul, Batman Begins

 

I think this process is something that we can all identify with. Before we can become the person that will achieve all of our dreams and aspirations, the person that does not get tired, that goes the extra mile, and performs consistently at the highest level, we have to wade through miles of hardship. Unless you’re one of the select few that are genetically gifted by God, you have to hustle. Hell, even if you’re freakishly talented, you still have to work hard to get to the highest level. You have to grind your way through those early morning practices and late night work shifts. You have to turn down that cake, that drink, or that afternoon spent watching netflix so you can do what you have to do. There’s no real way around it. You just have to do it.

All of this takes time. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne didn’t become Batman until he was 29. Jesus didn’t start his ministry until he was around 30 and even Mozart spent 10 years practicing obsessively, day after day, before he became the biggest musical badass in history.

And honestly, for me it’s not even about the end result. It’s about those ten years of hard, quiet, consistent work before emerging as someone or something else. It’s about being in the midst of it, in the trenches, always striving to be a little bit better. That’s what I love and that’s what this blog is about. That process.
Becoming Batman